More than 100 serotypes of human rhinoviruses (HRV), which are the major causes of colds, have been described (Stott & Killington, 1972; Cooney et al., 1982; Hamparian et al., 1987). Although the diseases caused by rhinoviral infections are normally not serious in themselves, they may produce secondary infections in a weakened organism; these secondary infections are of economic and social significance. In spite of the considerable progress made in understanding this group of viruses, effective vaccination has hitherto always been ruled out because of the number of serotypes. Diagnosis of a rhinovirus and determination of the serotype circulating within a population can at present only be achieved by complex serological analysis (Cooney et al., 1982; Kellner et al., 1988).
One object of the present invention was to develop a simplified method of classification of viruses, particularly rhinoviruses.
Hitherto, the nucleotide sequences of the RNA genomes from 4 HRV strains have been determined: HRV1B (Hughes et al., 1988), HRV2 (Skern et al., 1985), HRV14 (Stanway et al., 1984; Callahan et al., 1985) and HRV89 (Duechler et al., 1987). Analysis of the sequences showed that there are significant areas of identical sequences within the 5'-non-coding regions of these and other picornaviral genomes (Rivera et al., 1988). Two such blocks (the bracketed sequences) are conserved in the four rhinovirus serotypes which have been sequenced hitherto.
These blocks have, on the one hand, 23 identical nucleotides, namely between nucleotides #531 and 553 (1st bracketed sequence) and a further 21 identical nucleotides between numbers #161 and 181 (2nd bracketed sequence). Unless otherwise stated, the positional data refer to the numbering of HRV2 (Skern et al., 1985, FIG. 2, pages 2117-2121).